I look back at this past year, and wish I wouldn’t have made the decision to download my first dating app. I look back and also see that I left a perfectly good job, because I wanted something more suited to me. I went on a long journey of heartache and deep healing instead. I’m trying to tell myself that needed to happen though… I know it brought much fruit and will serve me in my future life/relationships.
But because of the stress I was depressed for months, had some ruptures in friendships, got severe insomnia, and shed lots of hair. I also still think about the guy a lot. Sometimes I wish my sis in law had never suggested I downloaded the app🥲 but I hope and pray it did good for him. Even though it’s been painful, I know the connection was profoundly instrumental in my life.
There is another beautiful side to the damage done. I went to therapy and talked about issues I had never shared with anyone. I’ve filled my journal with lessons and words I want to put in a book someday. I know it took that much of a low to teach me truth, to grow my faith, to cultivate genuine confidence, to help me understand & live out what I value.
The emotional pain forced me to move up and out of the head space I was in. I lost 10 lbs initially due to stress but have maintained it – because of the exercise I’ve had to do to move that restlessness/sadness along.
sigh…if y’all have stories you’d like to share or any thoughts?
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I have very similar thoughts about my choice to participate heavily in student theater in college. I went to a school with a really prestigious and competitive theater program. I put tons of time and effort into the student-run theater scene. In the fall of my senior year, I was directing a show that my best friend wrote, and the pressure of it all got to be too much. I shut down, stopped attending classes, and could barely get out of bed.
My boyfriend, the friend who wrote the play, and a few other close friends had literal interventions for me, which led to me getting on antidepressants and going to therapy for the first time. Gaining control of my mental health like that ended up being a life-altering decision for the better.
I often look back and ask myself, “Why couldn’t you have just stopped overextending yourself when you first started to feel like theater was a chore? Why did you have to take on so many high-level commitments to things that were totally optional?” Every show I committed myself to became I choice I regretted.
But the way I see it now, there was always going to be a “straw that broke the camel’s back” with my mental health. If it wasn’t theater, it might have been my first job, or planning my wedding… and by the time I was doing those things, I had the medication and therapy I needed to live a better life.
I wish I was brave enough to have taken a mortgage on a small flat at the start of covid. I had just enough saved up for the down payment but I was too afraid of what was gonna happen to blow all my savings on that, didn’t know if my job was gonna last, if the world was gonna end or what, so I put it off. After covid ended, I got broken up with in a very painful way, so I had other things on my mind for a while. When I was finally in a headspace to start thinking about buying property again, the prices have literally doubled. Literally. So I can’t afford it anymore and likely never will. Now I have this recurring existential dread that I’ll never own property in my city, I’m scared of renting forever but I also love this city and I don’t want to move. I’m doing my best to increase my income but the prices keep rising, so I’m afraid no matter what I’ll do, the price hikes will always be 10 steps ahead of me. My country has the 3rd highest property price increases in Europe in the past 5 years and I keep thinking, this can’t go on forever but maybe it can because capitalism.
I truly believe that who I am today – for better or worse – is the result of every decision I’ve made, even the ones I might regret in hindsight.
Looking back with today’s awareness can be painful, but I try to hold compassion for the version of me who made those choices. She was doing the best she could with what she knew at the time.
For me, that’s part of what it means to accept yourself fully – not just living with your past, but honoring it as part of your becoming.
I would have but it led me on this fantastic journey like yours. Can’t regret nothing x